‘Killer Inside’: The 9 Most Shocking Takeaways From Netflix’s Aaron Hernandez Doc

The first episode of Killer Inside explores Hernandez’s seemingly typical in Bristol, Connecticut. Like his son, Dennis Hernandez had exceptional abilities on the field –he played football at Bristol Central High School and later at the University of Connecticut — and he expected Hernandez to be equally devoted to the sport. “He’s very hard on me,” a young Hernandez says in archival footage. “We work all summer. If I drop a ball, it’s 100 push-ups.”

Friends and family describe Dennis as a strict “man’s man” who expected that Hernandez and his brother DJ conform to strict gender stereotypes. While Hernandez admired his father, Killer Instinct also alleges that Dennis was physically abusive, and when he died suddenly in 2006, Hernandez was left with host of complicated emotions. Dennis’ death fundamentally altered Hernandez’s emotional state and had a large impact on his career: after his father died, the tight end backed out of his commitment to UConn and instead opted to play football at the University of Florida.

Netflix’s Aaron Hernandez documentary features an interview with Dennis SanSoucie, a high school friend who alleges that he and the former NFL player were in a gay relationship for almost five years. SanSoucie claims that he and Hernandez “had an on and off-relationship from the seventh grade to junior year of high school,” and that he was just “a small piece of Aaron’s sexual activity.” Says the former Bristol Central High School quarterback, “Me and Aaron experimented. And it was something that, I’ll be honest, that we continued because we probably enjoyed it. Um, hello?”

Hernandez’s sexuality is a major theme of Killer Inside, which suggests that the stress of repressing his queer identity ultimately contributed to his downfall. Producers included an interview with former New England Patriot Ryan O’Callaghan, who came out as gay in June 2017, in an attempt to illustrate how internalized homophobia can negatively affect someone, particularly someone ingrained in the hyper-masculine world of the NFL. “I think the whole story about Aaron is really unfortunate because you don’t know what drove him to do these things,” says O’Callaghan. “If he was able to to be himself and have some of these negative things not in his life, what kind of difference would that have made?”

The documentary also suggests that rumors about Hernandez’s sexuality may have played a role in his 2017 suicide. Just two days before his death, reporter Michelle McPhee implied on a radio show that Hernandez was gay; Killer Inside implies that McPhee’s comments were problematic and may have prompted an impulsive reaction from the player.

After his father died, Hernandez’s relationship with his mother deteriorated, and he became incredibly close with his older cousin Tanya Singleton. Hernandez moved into Singleton’s house, and it was there that he was first introduced to the world of violence and drugs. In 2015, Singleton, who was battling breast cancer at the time, was called to testify before a grand jury investigating Odin Lloyd’s murder, but she refused. She later plead guilty to contempt and served a few months in prison in order to protect her cousin.

While searching Singleton’s house for evidence related to Lloyd’s death, investigators found a silver SUV used in a 2012 double homicide in Boston. The SUV connected Hernandez to the double homicide, and he was later indicted. After a 2017 trial, he was acquitted (more on that below).

In October 2015, Singleton passed away in her home after a years-long battle with breast cancer. Jailhouse phone calls reveal that Tanya Singleton’s death rocked Hernandez, who can be heard crying on the phone to his fiancée and mother of his daughter, Shayanna Jenkins.

Hernandez quickly made an impact at the University of Florida, but he struggled off the field. The talented 17-year-old, who began acquiring an impressive array of tattoos, didn’t quite fit in with clean-cut quarterback Tim Tebow or coach Urban Meyer, and he began to rely on painkillers to bypass injuries. “For real, weed and Toradol. That’s all you need, baby!” Hernandez said on one recorded phone call with former teammate Mike Pouncey.

Hernandez’s behavior started to become increasingly erratic. One night, he allegedly punched out a bar manager who asked him to pay for his drinks. Episode 2 also references “an open case in Gainesville” from 2007, in which a man matching Hernandez’s description fired a gun into another car. The men in the car were shot, but survived.

Meyer and his wife Shelley attempted to steer the young player back on course, but the situation would get bad again whenever he would return home to Connecticut. “We knew that every time he went home — every time he would go to Connecticut, I’d have players on my team say, ‘Watch this guy,'” said Meyer on an old episode of HBO’s Real Sports. “So we would try not to let him go back to Connecticut.”

Hernandez was an undeniable star at the University of Florida, but his young age (he was just 20 years old when he entered the NFL) and concerns about his character pushed him down in the draft order. After some cajoling on Urban Meyer’s part, he was ultimately drafted in the fourth round by the New England Patriots, which put him less than two hours away from his home Connecticut.

NFL fans know that Patriots coach Bill Belichick has a very specific style, and Hernandez struggled to fit in to the no-nonsense culture. “The Patriots just try to ruin all your fun because they want you to only be business, which is why they win,” he says in one jailhouse recording. Former Patriots including Jermaine Wiggins, Ryan O’Callaghan, and Leigh Bodden swear by this method, but with his demons knocking at the door, it was difficult for Hernandez to buy in. Before long, the tight end’s worlds collided, as the unsavory characters he met at Tanya Singleton’s house in Connecticut, including Carlos Ortiz and Ernest Wallace, started hanging around near Boston and pushed him further into the world of drugs and illegal weapons.

According to Killer Inside, Hernandez began to fear for his safety around 2013, shortly before Odin Lloyd’s murder. As his relationship with a drug dealer named Alexander Bradley deteriorated, he even asked Belichick to be traded to another team, but the longtime Patriots coach said no.

By 2013, Hernandez had become good friends with local drug dealer Alexander Bradley (both men were later connected to the the 2012 murder of Daniel Jorge Correia de Abreu and Safiro Teixeira Furtado). During a trip to Miami in early 2013, Hernandez began to get paranoid that they were being followed by police. Bradley claims that he fell asleep on their way home from a strip club, and when he woke, the Patriots star was pointing a gun at his head. The next morning, police found Bradley covered in blood at a parking lot; he survived, but lost an eye in the attack.

Rather than pursue charges against Hernandez, Bradley opted to get revenge. The men sent threatening texts back and forth and attempted to extort one another, but nothing much came of it. In 2015, they found themselves on opposite sites of the courtroom when Bradley testified that Hernandez killed de Abreau and Furtado (Hernandez claimed that Bradley pulled the trigger).

On June 26, 2013, Hernandez was charged with first degree murder and arrested in connection with Odin Lloyd’s death. He was released from the Patriots about 90 minutes later and immediately allowed fans to replace their #81 jerseys with new memorabilia. Patriots owner Robert Kraft testified on behalf of the prosecution in the 2015 homicide trial, telling the jury that Hernandez told him that “he was not involved” in Lloyd’s murder because he was “in a club” at the time of the incident.

In April 2015, almost two years after his arrest, Hernandez was found guilty of first degree murder and automatically sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He continued to file appeals until his death, when Massachusetts law vacated his conviction. Lloyd’s family pushed back in the courts, and in March 2019, Hernandez’s conviction was once again reinstated.

Two years after he was convicted, Hernandez returned to the courtroom for the murder trial of de Abreu and Furtado. Witnesses testify that in 2012, someone in a silver SUV — the same car found in Singleton’s garage — fired five shots into de Abreu and Furtado’s car, killing them both. Police identified Hernandez as a potential suspect, but did not indict him until May 2014. He played an entire season for the Patriots as a murder suspect.

The trial began in March 2017 and was based heavily on Bradley’s testimony. The drug dealer claimed that he and Hernandez were at a club in Boston when de Abreu and Furtado accidentally spilled a drink on them. Shortly after, the prosecution argued, Hernandez followed them and shot into their car.

Hernandez pleaded not guilty and hired famed attorney Jose Baez, who previously defended Casey Anthony, as his lead counsel. On April 14, 2017, Hernandez was acquitted of both murders.

Five days after he was acquitted of the 2012 double homicide, Hernandez committed suicide in his prison cell. His family donated his brain to Boston University, where researchers discovered that his brain showed signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a brain injury that is associated with repeated blows to the head. Researchers revealed that Hernandez’s CTE was incredibly advanced (stage 3 of 4), as they found “substantial damage that undoubtedly took years to develop.”

While CTE has since become a major concern, the NFL was just beginning to grasp the scope of the issue in 2017. Killer Inside features various players’ perspective on the issue, including Jermaine Wiggins, who claims that CTE was “an absolute cop-out” for Hernandez’s crimes, and Chris Borland, who left the league after one season due to health concerns. “There’s a certain degree of hubris,” he says of the NFL. “The reason football’s the most popular sport is because it’s violent. So they’re not in the health business. They’re in the violence business.”

Watch Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez on Netflix